The Door (25 page)

So perfectly did this theory fit the facts that I found myself stopping in the hall and turning to look back at Katherine, secure in the dignity of her grief, handsome and immobile in her chair.

The suite was a four-roomed one. Each of the rooms opened onto the hall, and the sitting room occupied a corner. To the right was the room which Howard had occupied, and beyond it a small one for maid or valet. Opening from the sitting room on the left was another bedroom, and just beyond it lay the service staircase.

Miss Todd was explaining.

“The small bedroom was used by the nurses, as it connected with the sickroom. The one beyond was kept for Mr. Walter, and for several nights he slept there.”

But whatever their secret, the rooms yielded nothing.

I was still thinking of Margaret, and I wondered then if Katherine suspected what I did; if behind her strangeness during these last weeks there had been such a suspicion; a terror in which she saw her wifehood not only stultified but destroyed, and Judy nameless. And I know now that she had suspected, had feared just that. Why had Howard come, almost stealthily, to the city, light of luggage and without his valet, prearranging to meet Walter and dining upstairs so that they might talk undisturbed, unless it was that Walter had some shocking and terrible thing to tell him? Something which Howard refused to believe, and later had believed.

When I went out into the hall again she had not moved in her chair.

Miss Todd glanced toward her.

“She looks very sad.”

“She is in great grief, naturally.”

She was locking the door. Now she turned to me swiftly, and lowered her voice.

“He was a fine man, Mr. Somers,” she said. “No nonsense about him; you know what I mean. If you sat where I do—! So you’ll understand me when I tell you this: there was a young woman who tried to see him, after he began to improve. I think myself that she had waited below in the lobby until she saw Miss Gittings go for her walk, and then came up. She didn’t come to the desk. She got out of the elevator somewhere below and came up the service stairs. I happened to see her, or she’d have been inside. She had tried the bedroom door, but it was locked, and I caught her before she got to the sitting room door.”

“What excuse did she give?”

“She said she must be on the wrong floor. She was looking for a Mrs. Stewart, from St. Louis. But I took the trouble to find that there was no Mrs. Stewart from St. Louis or anywhere else, in the house.” We were close to Katherine now, so she lowered her voice still further. “She was a pretty girl,” she added hurriedly, “with bright red hair. And she went as white as a sheet when I spoke to her.”

I
HAD PLENTY TO
think of that day, and plenty of time in which to think.

It is a strange fact that death or sickness brings friends in numbers. They call, send flowers, telephone. But real trouble, a trouble like ours with its accompaniment of tragedy and shame, embarrasses them. The kindest thing apparently is to stay away.

I did not miss them, but I did miss the Inspector. I had grown fond of him, and his visits had been breaks in what were long and not too cheerful days. But he too, perhaps out of some mistaken sense of delicacy, was absenting himself, and I was much alone.

I needed him badly that day. Elise’s discovery of a “ghost” in the trunk room, the possibility that Mary Martin as long ago as last summer had tried to see Howard, and that angry statement of Howard’s to Wallie, “if you think you are going to hold that over me you can think again”; all these must have some bearing on our mystery.

And he was friendly to us. I knew that. Friendly and not too certain of Jim’s guilt. I was resolved that from now on there would be no reservations on my part. I would show him the clock dial paper and tell him of that quarrel in the hotel. But before I did that I would go over Sarah’s record of Howard’s illness. She had a habit of scrawling on them odd facts, not always relating to the patient.

“Set mouse trap,” I recall seeing on one of them long ago.

It was with a certain amount of hope then that I went up to Sarah’s room that afternoon.

The records I had placed in the lower drawer of her wardrobe trunk, and I got them out and laid them on the bed. They were all there; Judy’s diphtheria, the measles among Laura’s children, the time I fell downstairs and broke my collar bone, and Katherine’s periodic quinsy.

At last I found what I wanted. I sat back and went over it carefully. The early days of that sickness at the hotel had been active ones; the records showed treatments, hypodermics, careful comments on the patient’s pulse, his weakness, his depression. It was clear that he had been depressed.

Then came improvement. “Patient more cheerful.” “Appetite better.” “Sitting up in bed today.” On the eighth day came an entry at four o’clock. “Mr. Walter with patient from four to six while I took walk. Reports him more cheerful.” After that, not regularly, but often, came the entry, “Out for walk. Patient comfortable.”

It was not until I reached the date when Mr. Waite had made the rough draft of the will, August 12th, that I found anything of importance. The page for that date, and the one for the day following, were missing!

I could not believe it at first. I went over the record again and again; I even searched the other records, neatly clamped together and docketed. But it was not until I reexamined the page dated August 11th that I found anything, and what I found was more surprising than helpful.

At the bottom of the column marked Notes, Sarah had written in pencil “August 12th and 13th withdrawn for safekeeping.” And beneath that: “Clock dial. Five o’clock right. Seven o’clock left. Press on six.”

“Withdrawn for safekeeping.” Then Sarah had known that she had written something on those two pages which was of grave importance; I only prayed that she had not known how grave. What visitors had she entered in that column on the 12th? Or what had happened to make Howard Somers, on that very day, decide to make a new will and leave Wallie a half of his estate plus a secret fund?

It was beyond me. I locked the room, went downstairs and telephoned for the Inspector.

He came that night, looking sheepish and uncomfortable.

“Didn’t know you’d care to see me,” he said.

“You know well enough that you don’t believe Jim Blake is guilty, Inspector.”

To my alarm he shook his head.

“I’m not so sure. He was with the Gunther girl that night, according to the colored woman. He knew about the will all right. Mind you, I’m not saying he’d planned the thing. He got excited and angry, and Sarah Gittings wouldn’t give up the will. Maybe he knocked her down first. Then he went crazy, and he finished the job.”

My heart sank.

“After that he’d have to do away with Florence. She new too much.”

“And Howard?”

“Murder’s not proved there.”

However, when I told him of what we had learned at the hotel, and about Mary Martin, he seemed less certain.

“Funny thing about that girl,” he said. “We can’t locate her. You’d think she’d be looking for work, but she hasn’t. The District Attorney isn’t interested, but I am. She knows a lot, if you ask me.”

“Do you always find what you are looking for, Inspector?”

“Pretty often.”

And then I laid out on the desk that page from Sarah’s record, and the clock dial Judy had found in Florence’s shoe. His face was a study when I explained the latter.

“So Judy found it, eh?” he said, and poked it with the end of a toothpick. “Intelligent girl, Miss Judy. And what does she think it means?”

“In view of the record, I think it indicates the place where Sarah hid the two missing pages.”

He placed the two clock dial directions side by side, and fell to studying them.

“They are not ciphers,” he said. “They are perfectly clear directions, if one only—I suppose you’ve tried all your clocks?”

“The young people have,” I said resignedly.

“The chances are that it doesn’t refer to a clock at all. Something which might be described in clock fashion; that’s all. And something to which one or both the women had access. Not a safe, either.”

“You think I’m correct as to the records?”

“It’s probably so. What happened is this: until Sarah learned the terms of the new will those records lay in her room. They had no importance, no value. But she learned the terms of the will, and then for some reason they were important. So she hid them. She may have hidden them first in the wood cellar; that would account for the chair.

“But before she went out that last night she hid them again. Now let’s see. She didn’t leave the house between her return at five-fifteen and seven, when she left again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Still, that means nothing. She didn’t die until ten o’clock. Between seven and ten she was somewhere, and according to the colored woman she was not at the house on Halkett Street.”

I was tempted then to tell him Jim’s story to Godfrey Lowell of that evening. But I did not.

“She went somewhere, and she hid those records,” he said. “Find where she went and we find them, and perhaps some other things I’d like to know. Why, for instance, with these two women dead, does the search for those records go on? What did Sarah Gittings record on at least one of those two days which is vital to the killer? Here’s Jim Blake under indictment, and they’re apparently still important.”

“Still very important,” I said, and then I told him about Elise and her ghost.

He asked at once to see the window, and later on he talked with Elise, while I interpreted as best I could. It was not until he was with us in the hall on the way out that he asked me if I suspected any of the servants.

“They could be bribed, you know,” he said. “Are you sure all this fright is genuine?”

“I have almost to put the women to bed myself, Inspector. As to Joseph, he puts up a good front, but I notice that he draws the window shades before dark now, and I’m terrified to walk suddenly into his pantry at night, for fear he shoots me.”

“He still maintains that he was attacked?”

“He’s sure of it.”

I went out to the drive with him. It was a warm spring night with plenty of stars, and he stopped and looked up at them.

“Mighty nice,” he said. “I like the stars. I like nature, too. And I’m in this sort of business!” But a moment later he was advising me to get back into the house.

“Either Jim Blake’s guilty, or whoever is guilty is still free. And that’s not a nice thought, Miss Bell. It’s somebody who can think faster than the police, and see every angle and every emergency. A dangerous mind, Miss Bell, prepared to go to any length to attain its end. Big men in business often have it, professional gamblers have it; some traders on the Exchange have it. Lombroso says there’s a criminal type. There may be. But there is a criminal mind, and this fellow has it.”

He waited to see that I got safely back into the house, and then went on.

That was the evening of the 27th of May, and long shall I remember it.

At half past nine Judy and Dick came in. Katherine had made it clear that Dick was not welcome at the Pine Street house, and so now and then the two of them met in my library. On such occasions I would discreetly retire, but I think even Katherine would have found these meetings harmless enough. Early and late the two were on the crime. On one never to be forgotten night, for example, Dick had lowered himself into the light shaft by his hands, and found that it was just possible to obtain a precarious foothold on the iron bar beneath.

But getting him out had been a different matter, and when at last he hung panting on the sill, both Judy and I were exhausted.

“Well,” he said. “If Jim Blake did that by himself, he’s a better man than I am, Rudyard Kipling.”

On this particular night they came in filled with suppressed excitement.

Amos had emerged from hiding long enough to see Dick that day, and he had told him certain details which he had withheld before the Grand Jury.

Dick did the talking, while Judy watched him.

“In the first place,” he said, “do you believe Jim Blake is guilty?”

“I do not.”

“Well, neither do we. But I’ve got something to tell you that will make you think. Amos went into his room the next morning, and he found some blood on Jim Blake’s clothes, and a handkerchief pretty well soaked with it. He showed it to Blake, and Blake said he’d cut his hand the night before. The hand was tied up, all right, and there was a cut. Amos saw it later. Of course he might have done that himself to explain the blood, but we don’t believe it. Amos is hiding because he doesn’t want to tell that at the trial. He cleaned the clothes as best he could, but when he sent the laundry out some time later he found that Jim had washed the handkerchief.

“But there’s something else. The next day, after Sarah was missing, at noon and after you had telephoned to him, Jim Blake got out of bed, dressed in some old clothes and went out. It was raining, and when he came back he was wet and his shoes were muddy.

“Now, I’ll admit that all that looks queer. I believe he was on that hillside the next day, looking for something. What? Either he’d killed Sarah and was afraid he’d dropped something incriminating, or he knew something had happened there the night before.

“He was there. He saw somebody, or something, but he isn’t saying what or who. Now why?

“Why has he done the things he has done? Why leave that sword-stick around until the body is found, and then only put it in a closet? That’s foolish.

“And why go to bed? Guilt? The normal thing would have been to go around as though nothing had happened. But he goes to bed, like a baby. Now what puts him to bed; if he wasn’t guilty he wasn’t scared. So what’s the answer? He’s shocked. He’s had an awful jolt of some sort. He’s either happened on the body or on the murderer with the body. If he saw only the body he’d have notified the police. But if he saw the murderer—”

“I daresay I’m stupid, Dick. If he’d seen either of them, why not call the police?”

Judy turned to me.

“Dick believes,” she said patiently, “that Uncle Jim recognized somebody on the hillside that night, and that he is either afraid to tell who it was, or that he has—other reasons.”